North Korea threatens 'war' if satellite is shot down

North Korea put its armed forces on standby for war Monday and threatened retaliation against anyone seeking to stop the regime from launching a satellite into space, in the latest barrage of threats from the communist country.

The warning came as U.S. and South Korean troops kicked off their annual war games across the South, exercises the North has condemned as preparation for an invasion. Pyongyang last week threatened danger to South Korean passenger planes flying near its airspace during the drills.

Analysts said the regime is trying to grab U.S. President Barack Obama's attention as his administration formulates its North Korea policy.

The North also indicated it was pushing ahead with plans to fire a communications satellite into space, a provocative launch neighbouring governments believe could be a cover for a missile test.

U.S. and Japanese officials have suggested they could shoot down a North Korean missile if necessary, further incensing Pyongyang.

"Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war," the general staff of the North's military said in a statement carried Monday by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Any interception will draw "a just retaliatory strike operation not only against all the interceptor means involved but against the strongholds" of the U.S., Japan and South Korea, it said.

Military ordered combat ready

The North ordered military personnel "fully combat ready" for war, news agency said in a separate dispatch.

South Korea's Defence Ministry spokesman Won Tae-jae downplayed the threats as "rhetoric" but said the country's military was ready to deal with any contingencies.

Analysts said a satellite or missile launch could occur late this month or in early April when the North's new legislature, elected Sunday, is expected to convene its first session to confirm Kim Jong-il as leader.

Kim, 67, who reportedly suffered a stroke last August near when elections were scheduled to be held and disappeared from the public eye for months, was unanimously re-elected to North Korea's parliament, according to state media reports on Monday.

All eligible voters in Constituency No. 333 cast ballots for Kim, renewing their "unshakable determination to devotedly safeguard" the leader, the news agency said in first results from Sunday's poll.

A list of all the legislators to the 12th Supreme People's Assembly is expected later Monday.

The U.S. special envoy on Pyongyang, Stephen Bosworth, met with South Korean officials Monday to discuss the tensions. Bosworth has urged Pyongyang to refrain from firing a satellite or missile, and to stop threatening its neighbours. He said Washington wants Pyongyang to defuse tensions through dialogue.

Ties between the two Koreas have deteriorated since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office a year ago halting aid unless the North fulfils an international promise to dismantle its nuclear program.

An angered North Korea suspended the reconciliation process and key joint projects with Seoul, and has stepped up the stream of belligerence toward the South.

Still technically at war

On Monday, North Korea also cut off a military hotline with the South for the duration of the 12-day joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, leaving the nations without any means of communication at a time when even an accidental skirmish could develop into a full-blown battle.

The two Koreas have used the hotline to exchange information about the crossing of goods and people through the industrial North Korean border city of Kaesong. Its suspension halted traffic and stranded about 570 South Koreans working in Kaesong.

Seoul urged Pyongyang to restore the line immediately.

The two Koreas technically remain in a state of war since their three-year conflict ended in a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, in 1953. Hundreds of thousands of troops are amassed on each side of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, making the Korean border one of the world's most heavily armed.

The United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, holds military exercises with the South every year. Pyongyang routinely condemns them as rehearsals for invasion despite repeated assurances from Seoul and Washington that the drills are purely defensive.

The exercises, which will involve some 26,000 U.S. troops, an unspecified number of South Korean soldiers and a U.S. aircraft carrier, are "not tied in any way to any political or real world event," Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of the U.S. troops, said Monday.